Professor Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the new president of the Royal Society, flies out to India tomorrow, first to have a short holiday in Rajasthan and then give a series of six lectures in Delhi, Chandigarh and Mohali.

"Venki", which is what everyone calls him, and his wife, Vera Rosenberry, an author and illustrator of children's books, have celebrated Christmas at home in Cambridge in a house filled with laughter and music. They were joined by their son, Raman Ramakrishnan, and daughter-in-law, Melisa Reardon, a cello player and a violist, respectively, who had come over from the US.

His lectures will be broadly about giving science and mathematics more of a central role in the life of the nation.

Rather daunting is Venki's ambition to debunk astrology and superstition which he dismisses along with their practitioners as "pseudoscience and charlatans". He is scornful of such phrases as "negative energy", often used by "new age healers", as mumbo jumbo.

He laughs when it's suggested that such things are part of the DNA of the Indian character.

"The point is that not everything that sounds scientific is science," he argues. "That is a worldwide problem - (but) in India it is perhaps more widespread because things like astrology are very prevalent. In the West 200 or 300 years ago there were these sorts of beliefs then - you know rationality is a sort of progression."

His lectures, he explains, are "really aimed at young people like students because they are at a stage where they are thinking of things and if they understand how science or evidence works, they hopefully will be influenced more by that sort of scientific thinking. It is young people who will go on and change things in the future. That is really my goal there."

At a personal level, Venki says he is not a scientist who spends all his time in the lab.

"Sure, I have lot of interests," he emphasises. "I like music, I like literature, history, I go on long hikes, I go on bicycle trips."

He reveals that in 2009, when he was getting his Nobel Prize for chemistry for his work on ribosomes, "I was taking my A level exams in Spanish that same year."

He wanted to learn Spanish to improve his enjoyment of South American literature.

If he were marooned on the proverbial desert island, he would take Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, as well as books by Oscar Wilde, Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro, Americans John Updike and Philip Roth, a couple of books by Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, and the story of the master spy Kim Philby told by Ben Macintyre in A Spy Among Friends.

"I grew up with P.G. Wodehouse - I still like him," he admits.

Among Indians, he would pick Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a "masterpiece".

As for movies, which he and his wife love watching - "I have a large collection" - he would take "old classics like David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia"; To Kill a Mockingbird and The Third Man.

All this is significant because Venki feels that in today's world, children specialise far too early with the subjects they study at school. The result that is those who focus on the arts know little about the sciences and those who take up the sciences know little about the arts. His mission is to reduce this "gap between the two cultures" and encourage children to study science and mathematics all the way through school.

"I would like science to be considered more central in society and more a part of our culture everybody should appreciate and take an interest in," he adds.

Venki's public lecture in Delhi, which is being sponsored by the British Council, is called "On Nobody's Word: Evidence and Modern Science". The theme is taken from the motto of the Royal Society, Nullius in verba (Latin for "Take nobody's word for it").

The motto was adopted when the Royal Society was set up in 1660. Venki is its 61st president and follows in the footsteps of such giants as Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy and Ernest Rutherford.

Another of his ambitions is to "promote exchange programmes with India", to which end he is holding a summit of the nation's top scientists. "I will be meeting Indian Fellows of the Royal Society and people from the Indian National Science Academy."

He will also be talking about some of the new results from research being done at the establishment where Venki is based in Cambridge - the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology on the sprawling Addenbrooke's hospital site. This is where Venki has worked since he arrived from the US in 1999.

Despite all his meanderings, he remains strictly vegetarian - he is happy to have discovered a modest south Indian restaurant near the Royal Society's headquarters in Carlton House Terrace in London.

Venki was born in Chidambaram in the Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu in 1952. His parents, C.V. Ramakrishnan and Ramakrishnan Rajalakshmi, were both scientists. After graduating from Baroda University, he studied or worked at a succession of universities or academic institutions in the US - Ohio University; Yale; University of California, San Diego; and Utah.

Venki married Rosenberry, who was studying painting, in 1975 after an 11-month courtship when he was 23. She was also vegetarian which was unusual for the time in Ohio. He had acquired not only a wife but also a step-daughter, Tanya Kapka. By 1976, when their son was born, he had completed a PhD and switched to biology.

On the day the Nobel Prize was announced on October 7, 2009, "I was halfway to work when my bicycle developed a flat tyre. As a result, I came in quite late and somewhat irritated," he recalls.

When he got the call from Stockholm, he was convinced it was a prank-loving colleague and "even complimented him on his Swedish accent". That evening after several champagne bottles were opened in his lab, "Vera and I walked my bicycle home in the rain".

As someone who has lectured all over the world, Venki is relaxed addressing large audiences. The accent is American but he is softly spoken. He affects the uniform of the English academic - the crumpled jacket, casual trousers and a shirt with no tie.

I have met Venki at his lab in Cambridge and at lunch or dinner in London. I know he still does not have a car and cycles everywhere. Initially, when he tried reluctantly to buy a mobile phone, the shop thought he was a dodgy customer and wouldn't give him the necessary credit. He now has one but feels happiest keeping it switched off.

The theory that there is a gap between the science and arts lobbies is not a new one, Venki acknowledges. It was propounded in 1959 in Cambridge by C.P. Snow, a scientist-turned-author, who published a book, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. But Venki fears the gap "may have got worse".

Snow noted that intellectuals in the arts lobby expressed "their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

Venki's view is that "science can be made intelligible and accessible if people make just a little bit of effort". He says that if children stick with science and mathematics right through school, they will have a better understanding of the some big issues of the day, such as climate change, nuclear power, GM crops, the use of the Internet and energy sources.

"I think it's important to have some basic level of scientific literacy and what is called mathematical numeracy," he says.

As for India sharing in the glory of his Nobel Prize (and that of Amartya Sen), he wonders why Indians are relatively unexcited about Ashoke Sen, the theoretical physicist known for his work on string theory and who shared in the $22m Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics set up by the Russian Yuri Milner.

In Indians not giving as much importance to Sen as they do to Nobel Prize winners, "there is something a little wrong," he remarks.

This is Venki's second visit to India in a month - he was in Bangalore for a quick meeting in early December.

A question not to ask Venki is: "How should India win more Nobel Prizes?"

"That's actually completely the wrong question because there are so many discoveries that never get a Nobel Prize. It's not a good reason to go into anything," he responds.

"First of all countries don't win them, it's people who win them," he points out. "If a person from a country wins a Nobel Prize it doesn't necessarily mean that that county is doing well overall. It could be just a fluke. It is more important for a country to just nurture scientists and provide them good environments, a decent living and help them to lead a productive life."